I am a Cat Woman. My self-appointed mission in life is to save the feline world! To accomplish this mission, I get cats fixed. Perhaps my mission might be slightly delusional. This blog is a mishmash of wishful thinking, rants, experiences as I remember them and of course, cat stories and cat photos. I love cats.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

New Worry--Sequestration and HUD

I never realized sequestration (love that word) could neutralize my life. Naive me.

Well it could.

Click Here! Some 250,000 HUD vouchers of choice, where tenants find their own landlord, may be eliminated with sequestration, if it goes on, March 1, triggering across the board cuts in government departments including HUD.

The above link gives a state by state estimate of voucher numbers that may be eliminated. Oregon's estimate is about 2700. I think to myself "should I be staking out space under a bridge somewhere about now?" There may be quite a rush later.

I'll get warning, right, if it's me eliminated?

I can't think of another back up plan. I've been going through that with my car, trying to think about what I should do. Right now, with no other options clear, I'm letting the oil leak be. I add about half a quart a week. I can do that. I hope it doesn't get much worse. Of course it will but I can hope.

Also, I discovered a long ago denial can be a person's best friend ever. The leak isn't there if I look away.

It also needs the air conditioner belt either tightened or replaced. It shrieks dreadfully sometimes, but it's been doing that a couple of months.

I think the vibration is from shot struts. I've never changed them. This is a car with 217,000 miles on it and it has hauled some heavy loads for me. So that's not that terrible if it is just the struts causing vibrations. I sure wanted that wrecked Xa's front driver's seat. Mine is worn to metal and I still want that seat.

I use a blanket or pillow on the seat to protect my butt, but it bunches up and scooches this way or that and gives me back and leg issues (more of them).

Anyhow I don't know what to do about the car, if I should pay out somehow to fix the rear main or let it leak til it pours.

And now with sequestration cutting HUD vouchers across the country, if that happens, I'm going to be living on pins and needles waiting to see if the axe will be dropping across my neck. I don't want it to be me.

But if it is me, I need to have some kind of a plan going on in my mind of what to do then. But what the hell kind of plan would that be? To my knowledge there's nothing possible I could plan to do. My brother probably wouldn't kick me out but I couldn't pay the bills. Better to camp out here with the electric off, cooking over a camp stove, than to live under a bridge though. I won't be able to consider fixing the car if I lose the voucher, but then the problem still exists, of how do I get groceries, cat litter, get around, without a car. Except for reasons unknown I don't expect my car to ever quit running. It's been so faithful, so wonderful, why would that ever stop, I think. No reason. That rear main seal leak could go on years before it's so bad I can't add enough oil to compensate, I think now.

Oh man alive, I don't know how anyone affords to live anymore.

I don't want to be homeless. I don't want to think of living totally in the rough, shutting off the electric so I could have a chance at staying here, no frig, heat, shower, but I could do it if I had to. Be hard but I could do it. I'd have to cut other things besides the electric also. But for now my plan B will be, if I lose the voucher in sequestration, to immediately shut of the electric, to cut costs and go from there. Gotta to have a Plan B, just in case its me.

I don't know how they're going to choose who gets cut out of a housing voucher if sequestration happens. I hope they don't choose people who are born on sequestration day! I want to have a big old birthday party this year. Because it's like everything is getting harder and harder and why not celebrate still being alive through all this?

I saw some photos a few weeks back. They were photos of China occluded in thick clouds of air pollution. People driving couldn't even see. People on the street looked like they were walking in thick dense fog and people had to wear masks. But it wasn't fog. It was toxic air pollution.

When I saw those photos I knew we as a species are screwed. When people exist in that kind of pollution and seem to accept it and don't rise up and demand change, or even when people or nations let that happen, you know our species has no future. I became totally depressed after I saw those photos and made that realization. Those photos changed me.